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Those from the upper- and middle-classes who go to Oxbridge will do fine – as they were always going to do. But Blair’s dream of a working-class kid getting a degree that would catapult him or her up the social ladder has not come off. Instead, they’ll probably end up doing similar work to their school-leaver parents – only with a debilitatingly large debt around their necks…

the reason the Great Degree Scramble has not paid off in better jobs is because Labour did not try to provide them. That would have required nurturing new businesses and raising conditions for the most awful jobs – the sort of thing Blair and his party emphatically did not do…

Up until the mid-90s, Switzerland – one of the richest and most industrialised nations in the world – sent only 10-15% of students off to get a degree. But it made sure the others had apprenticeships with actual businesses and vocational training. There must, surely, be a lesson in that.

Chakrabortty is absolutely right to argue that Labour failed to do enough to improve working conditions or to provide enough in the way of vocational training. They emphasised the virtues of a university education without doing enough to say why work-based training was worthwhile. But Labour’s aims of increasing working class access to university were admirable despite their questionable means (top-up fees) of achieving those aims.

Critics of the explosion in university applications rarely appear to expect anyone other than the working classes to be the ones who should stop going to university. Chakrabortty follows this trend when he unquestioningly contrasts the failure of the working class students to profit from their university education with the continuing ability of upper- and middle- class graduates to enter highly-paid or highly-valued work. He seems to write with an underlying assumption that it’s normal and right for middle- and upper- class A-Level students to go to university and for working-class students to move into vocational training.